Everything to do with phonetics. Please note: comments not signed with your genuine name may be removed.

Tuesday, 11 December 2012

alas, no voicing

Pablo Solares writes from Spain to ask how to tell whether a word has s or z. Given that daisy has z, he says,

I do not understand why it is fortis in basicˈbeɪsɪk. I thought that after diphthongs it was always fortis.

The best I can say in reply is that your supposed rule is wrong. In English, unfortunately, the pronunciation cannot reliably be determined from the spelling. That applies particularly to the matter of s versus z with the spelling s.

Compare phase with z and base with s. Or, for that matter, erase with z in BrE but s in AmE.

Although the spelling z or zz reliably signals z (except in a few borrowed words), while c before i, e, y may correspond to s but never to z, even double ss sometimes corresponds to z rather than s, as in scissorsˈsɪzəz and possessionspəˈzeʃn̩z.

That’s why you should always look up the pronunciation in a suitable
dictionary, and learn each new word with its pronunciation.

Jack Windsor Lewis suggests that Mr Solares might like to look at Section 4 Item 5 Spellings of the English Phonemes at www.yek.me.uk. Para 13 deals with /s/, while para 14, on /z/, mentions the oddity of electricity (calling the /z/ form "a common subvariant').